June 28, 2014 at 2:43 pm

Despite it being a little while since our last post on the blog, we’ve not actually been absent, nor have we been neglecting the platform. Far from it actually.

As well as working daily to help our users and develop new themes and sites for our clients we’ve also been hard at work continuing the development of Unusual Light.

New dashboard:

Our new dashboard launched yesterday. As well as some fancy charts, graphs and maps the hope is that it will be easier for users to get the information they need from their site at a quick glance. This includes:

Details on blog comments, visitor analytics statistics from the last 30 days, shop sales stats and quick links to create new content.

We’ll be adding more content to this area as time goes on, and we’re listening to your ideas, so if you have a feature you’d like to see in this area then let us know in the comments.

Images are photographs of live dashboards, not mockups

Interactive photo essays plugin:

Over the past few years there has been an increase on the amount more interactive photo essays to be published and produced by the likes of New York Times (eg: 1, 2, 3).

We’ve seen this demand emerging and started to develop our plugin photo essays plugin in September last year.

Our plugin will allow users to easily create a series of “panes” which can contain, video, text, html, photos or basically any sort of web object you can imagine. Videos can automatically play when they are on the screen and pause when they move off. Each slide can have background sounds attached and be loaded with different sorts of animations, including the “slow animation” which loads a single frame per each mousewheel scroll on the site!

We’re almost ready to go live with this, but before then we’re looking to work with photographers and create some test cases.

We’ll create a blog post in the coming week where people can propose working with us.

New Tumblr theme:

We’ve been developing a new tumblr theme for our users over the last half a year.

This theme is highly customisable and will allow users to embed the theme into their Unusual Light theme quickly whilst offering a large variety of layout options which should see it fit extremely well in their site. This tumblr theme will be launched in beta mode early next week.

Watch our blog for more information.

New templates:

We’re almost ready to launch two new templates and a brand new presentation slideshow.

The new presentation slideshow will allow users to open their slideshows with a single image, video, text or a series of slideshow and will contain navigation links to allow visitors to easily move to another series of images. More on this next month.

General updates and maintenance:

If all of the above wasn’t enough to keep us busy, as always there’s been some updates and maintenance, code tweaks, bug fixes and adjustments to keep our fingers coding away!